/ 8 August 2014

Quest for a mythic people

The Side of the Sun at Noon by Hazel Crampton.
The Side of the Sun at Noon by Hazel Crampton.

The Side of the Sun at Noon

by Hazel Crampton (Jacana)

‘The side of the sun at noon’ was a phrase used by the Nama people to describe the whereabouts of a great river. For those of us who live in the southern hemisphere this, of course, means “the north”, and the Nama told this to Simon van der Stel at the Cape more than a century after white people started ­living there. The river was the Gariep, which used to be known as the Great River, then the Orange River, before it got its Khoi name back.

Although this great waterway, South Africa’s biggest river, is central to the book’s narrative, it is not the centre of Hazel Crampton’s quest. Her search is for a people, said to live beyond the great river, called the Chobona. They are first mentioned in the meticulously kept journal of Jan van Riebeeck, the first Dutch commander at the Cape, who was told about them by a Khoi chief called Chaihantima, whose people lived somewhere east of Cape Town.

The person from whose lips he heard the story was Eva, also called Krotoa, who was the translator for Van Riebeeck and Van der Stel, and she plays quite a role in this book in which the writer is at pains to defend this clever young Khoi woman who died at 32 after an eventful life.

The Chobona were described as living “far inland”, “rich in gold,” with “large houses of stone with beams” and who “wear clothes”. At the time of Van Riebeeck, stories of the land of the Monomotapa were widely believed and he was convinced that they and the Chobona were one and the same nation. Crampton examines many reports of costly expeditions to the north and northeast, all of which were motivated by curiosity, greed or just the desire to trade.

One of the most interesting was that made by Jacobus Coetzee from the Piquetberg area, who reported the existence of the “Damroquas, having a tawny or yellow appearance, long hair and clothed in linen”. Karel Schoeman, in his fascinating tome Cape Lives of the Eighteenth Century (Protea Books, 2011), says this was “a reference in fact to the Herero”, but Crampton speculates that they had some connection to the Chobona.

Her detailed narrative is composed of many such complex speculations; she delights in tracing linguistic clues, and quotes extensively from contemporary sources. She makes much use of maps hand-drawn by herself from earlier versions, and annotated to explain routes taken. She enlivens this already interesting material with some sharp critique of earlier historians, whom she castigates for sexism, racism and general narrow-mindedness.

In the first half of the book she makes many, sometimes amusing, sexual allusions. She certainly intended to shake up current preconceptions and ways of approaching the journeys into the interior and her tone is often combative. But I would have preferred her own rather intrusive life anecdotes to have been ­confined to an appendix.

Renowned historians Schoeman and Jeff Peires escape her critique, and the latter was instrumental in helping her to source a previously overlooked document, the journal of Dr Andrew Cowan, which, like

its author, went missing. This expedition was undertaken for Lord Caledon, then governor at the Cape, who was certain that Delagoa Bay (now Maputo) could be reached overland and sent Cowan to find out. But Caledon’s term of office ended and he left the Cape soon after Cowan disappeared.

He in effect, possibly even deliberately, hid the traveller’s journal in his own vast body of papers, where it was found two centuries later in the Public Records of Northern Ireland.

Not only is this book densely mapped, there also are 130 pages of endnotes; some of these provide wonderful insights. But as Crampton or her publisher have dispensed with the use of op cit and ibid, etcetera, these are not always useful should you be mad enough to want to follow up a reference.

Her reliability as a historian is also called into question by a statement such as this one: “In 1836, when the northward migrations of the trekboers had hardly begun, and not even the seeds of apartheid had been sown here.” Given her reputation one would expect her to know the difference between trekboers and voortrekkers. And “the seeds of apartheid” were sown long before 1836.

Crampton pursues the Chobona obsessively in the welter of journeys undertaken over two centuries, but her quest is not only to see whether she could find these reputedly pale-skinned, rich, skilful people; her book is also a long examination of the absurdity of the concept of race.

She provides a picture of the interior at that time with many digressions on such topics as willow trees on the banks of the Gariep (were they indigenous or Babylonian?), Kakamas peaches, ivory-trading missionaries, smallpox inoculation in Africa long before Jenner, ancient roads and trade routes. Her real focus is the people – various groups of the Khoi, Tswana and Sotho, as well as traders from the east coast, and Eva’s many descendants. She does finally decide who she thinks the Chobona were and suggests a theory on the three linguistic sources of this name.